PUBLIC MARKS with search call-back

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Which is why I’m (again) stepping back. In a few hours, my Twitter account will be private. Apologies to my 700-odd followers, but I will be following only 42 people – a fitting figure – and have split the folk I’m sort of keeping track of but who continuously spam my timeline into a bunch of themed lists.

Shifting focus

Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 ~ 4:54 PM

This is the last new post that I'll be making on this blog. I decided a while back to shift the focus of my web activities, and thought it was time to formally close things off here.

Why stop posting here? Mostly just a feeling that I needed to shake things up a bit, to put some serious effort behind a few other ideas that I've wanted to work on for a while. Making a clean break just felt right.

There may still be some activity on this site as I back-fill some old posts from other blogging platforms. My goal is to eventually have this as a (more or less) complete archive of my personal blogging from early 1998 to this year. That's a background project of mine that I plan on allocating a bit more time to in 2010.

A huge thanks to Karl Dubost for hosting this blog for so long. In addition to providing this infrastructure, Karl has supported and inspired me in more ways then he may realize. That you are reading this today is due in no small part to him, so you can thank (or blame!) him.

Web developers are used to using dynamic and frameworks like Ruby on Rails to develop applications. When it comes to working with static, non-dynamic websites it can seem like stepping back in time.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.